THE FOUNDATION

Tapichalaca, the Foundation’s first reserve, was established in September 1998 to protect the type locality of the Jocotoco Antpitta - the name ‘Jocotoco’ is an onomatopoeic representation of the call of this elusive bird by the few local farmers who actually knew it.

ABOUT JOCOTOCO

The Jocotoco Foundation is an Ecuadorian non-government organization established in 1998 to protect land of critical importance to the conservation of Ecuador’s endangered birds and associated biodiversity. The Foundation primarily achieves this by purchasing lands and managing them as ecological reserves.

To date, the Jocotoco Foundation has established ten reserves protecting about 15,000 ha (approx 37,000 acres). While the reserves have primarily been established to protect habitat for endangered birds, their habitats and many associated plants and animals are protected as well. The Foundation’s reserves are known to support populations of over 800 species of birds, of which over 50 are globally threatened or near-threatened and more than 100 are restricted-range or endemic species.

The reserves are also home to over 200 species of reptiles and amphibians, many of them endangered and range-restricted and some only recently described, as well as large rare mammals such as Spectacled Bear, Woolly and Baird’s Tapirs, Puma, and Jaguar. All of the reserves are recognized as Important Bird Areas and Biodiversity Hot-spots and two of them as Alliance for Zero Extinction sites.

OUR HISTORY

On the 20th November 1997, Dr Robert Ridgely, ornithologist and author of many books including “The Birds of Ecuador” accompanied by four friends, visited Cerro Tapichalaca in Zamora-Chinchipe province to make recordings of bird calls and song. They heard a distinctive call unrecognisable to them, and after some effort they obtained close views of a pair of large Antpittas whose plumage was spectacularly different from any species then known to science.

It was subsequently described as the new species, Grallaria ridgleyi, the Jocotoco Antpitta. It is currently classified as globally Endangered. ‘Jocotoco’ was the name used by local farmers, imitating the noise they heard coming from thickets of vegetation on the steep slopes of the mountain, but the source of this call was seldom if ever seen.

During 1998, Fundación Jocotoco was formed, initially to conserve the habitat of the type locality of this new bird, - possibly the heaviest new bird species found in the last 30 years. It has then gone on to establish twelve more habitat reserves in the Andes and western provinces which also provide natural refuges for other globally threatened birds in Ecuador. Now, in 2015, the eleven reserves managed by Jocotoco are home to 36 of the 51 globally threatened species in mainland Ecuador, and 24 near-threatened species of birds, including both of the Critically Endangered species present on continental Ecuador.

BOARD: Foundation Jocotoco Members

The Board of the Jocotoco Foundation is currently comprised of the following people: